It’s the Holiday season, or that time of year where your emails scream buy me, buy me! To make this better for you, we are shipping some great coffee this month from DAK and have a great interview for you to read whilst you drink!
Thank you very much for your custom over the year, we love what we do and that people want to be a part of that. Enjoy the coffee this month and rest assured we will look to keep the good stuff coming next year!
Please tell us a little about the team and your passion for the industry
a) We just opened our new showroom. Including the employees in the showroom, we are a team of 22, representing at least 12 different countries.
b) We are quite proud of the success of the business and the reputation of the brand, specifically given that Veronique and I had very limited knowledge of specialty coffee when we started. We have had to learn on the go and so we are quite proud of where we are today
c) We have a strong dedication to maintaining quality at scale. It is our priority and the part of our business that we spend the most time on. Our vision is to make specialty coffee approachable, partly through design and partly by allowing people to experiment through our coffees
What factors are important for you in selecting producers to work with?
Traceability is very important, as well as establishing a feedback loop. We want to build collaborations with our producers in a way that allows us to give them feedback on what our customers like, but also for them to give us feedback on how we can help them improve. Long-term relationships are much more important for us than singular transactions.
How is the coffee community in your area and what part do you like to play?
The community in Amsterdam/Netherlands is quite bizarre. There are a quite a lot of very good roasters, but much less good cafes. It seems the local cafe scene has not yet caught up to the quality of the roasters and as a result these roasters have more of a presence internationally. We like to visit our customers around the world and to bring back best practices.
Your journey is really exciting around growth, quality and focus. What drives you? What excites you the most?
We have always strived to make specialty coffee more accessible to everyone. It is the basis of everything we do: from simple and accessible packaging, to very fast fulfillment+shipping, to a wide variety of taste profiles that are easy to experiment with, to roasting that emphasises ease of dial-in. Nothing excites us more than receiving comments from customers that tell us they used to drink very basic coffees and that now have a completely different perception on specialty coffee.
The DAK showroom! Looking good! Tell us a bit about this.
Our business is mainly wholesale and we often get asked where our customers can find certain coffees. Because no one orders the whole lineup and because it is hard to know which coffees have sold out, we wanted a space where our whole lineup is available and we can present the coffees as we would want to drink them.
What kind of joy is lined up in the private tastings?
For the tastings, we present 10 different coffees from different origins, different processing and at different price points. We then conduct a blind cupping of these coffees and force customers to have unbiased perception of these coffees. The variety around the table is used as a talking point to dig deeper into processing, coffee supply chain, pricing, etc.
Featured Coffees of the Month:
FILTER COFFEE
Juniper - Columbia - natural
A delicious Colombian Natural from Tres Rayas in Tolima. A rich, full-body coffee with tasting notes of juniper berries, black cherry and blackberry jam.
Pastel Pear - Kenya - washed
This is a beautiful clean and soft Kenyan profile that represents this year's harvest. This lot is an AA from Gathaithi Cooperative. Tasting notes of pear, yellow plum and white currant.
Darling Peach - Ethiopia - anaerobic washed
It is rare to find anaerobic washed coffees from Ethiopia. This lot, from Rumu Damo washing station is stunning and a great representation of washed ethiopian coffees: floral, peach, mandarine
ESPRESSO COFFEE
Tropical Punch - Costa Rica - natural
A delicious, creamy, fruity and round coffee from Acquiares Estate! This natural processed coffee is absolutely delicious as espresso with tasting notes of blackberry jam, cocoa and dates.
Macarena- Honduras - natural
A unique Honduran coffee from producers Moises and Marysabel Caballero with a heavy and silky mouthfeel! Complex with tasting notes of dark berries, cherry syrup and milk chocolate.
Kumquat Squat - Ethiopia - natural
A very expressive natural Ethiopian that is very sweet from Esayas Beriso in Guji. Tasting like dried apricots, kumquat jam, milky oolong and nougat.
Any closing remark you would like to make to our subscribers?
Nothing special! We simply want the subscribers to enjoy the coffees :)
